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Look upon my [game design] ye Mighty, and despair!

Posts

I really like Voltage from what I've seen, and the unfortunate eternal Caterpie battle that was the game of it I was involved with on here.

It's so simple, but I have to say my favourite thing about Voltage is the fact you give your initial Pokemon two types based on what moves you want them to use. For me at least it creates a really strong impression of your Pokemon from just the irregular typing. Say, a Fairy/Electric pikachu versus an Electric/Fighting one, you know?

Yeah, I'm immensely proud of the leeway offered in creating a Pokemon. Being able to completely customize your Typing, Moves, Weakness, and Resistances with a handful of elements and keywords gives you a lot of options without being too complicated, and as a GM I'm always really excited to see which direction a player takes in improving their pokemon.

Like 'oh man, that Move they designed is perfect. I can't wait to see how they describe it in battle.'

I do wonder if you could create a player driven system for it, so the opposing pokemon's attack, defence and possible counter-attack are rolled into the result of the player's roll, and whether that would speed things up and stop potential stalemates. But honestly its grand how it is right now. To be fair, that's just my Apocalypse World showing.

In actual practice lately, I've started countering each player action with a enemy action. Participation isn't quite what it used to be (I only have one or two active players at the moment), so waiting for a round to complete could end up wasting weeks. This interferes with the utility of the Speed stat a bit, but as far as concessions to the vagaries of PbP attendance go, it could be worse.

Base voltage also doesn't use dice! That was something that was added to the version you played, which I am more than a little ambivalent about. One of my core design tenets was that a Pokemon Move should always accomplish something, even if it isn't as much as you'd hoped, so attacks that could outright 'miss' weren't really a thing (between an equal number of relatively equal exp Pokemon, battles shouldn't last much longer than 4 rounds, was how I tried to calculate things).

I did make a diced version based off of 'Strike!' though, with d6 rolls determining whether an attack didn't deal quite as much damage as it should, or if you landed a coveted Critical Hit. It would probably be really easy to make a 'Pokemon World' off of a Voltage base, but I haven't really given it much thought, what with how much I enjoy my dicelessness.

Current version is on the Voltage Wiki. Without random input, Pokemon battles typically play out as a battle of wits between trainers, as they attempt to figure out, and take advantage of, weaknesses in their opponent's Pokemon and leverage the strengths of their own. Trainer actions (and Pokemon Assists) are largely token based. You spend Voltage and Trait tokens from your trainer to either accomplish specific effects (Exploits) or exchange them temporarily for more specific token effects that you expect to use later (Support).

I make a lot of half finished games, but what I'm posting here is, basically, me the roleplaying game. This is what I go to whenever I just want to play with some mates or the little humans that I visit between deployments without prep or having to teach complex rules.

It's my ad-lib anything roleplaying game, Waiting for the Bus in the Rain.

There isn't much to it but it's finished and pretty darn fun. It wouldn't hold up to anything more than an afternoon if you want to play "Ninja Italian Renaissance Painters" or "X-Men Run a Coffee Shop", though I myself once GM'ed about two months of "Heavy Metal Band Fight Jotun Who Have Kidnapped Thor and Taken Over the World" with just the core rules I'm presenting here.

I think it would work okay in play by post format, and I'd be interesting in taking it for a spin on here, any thoughts?

I think this is so crazy it might work. Sounds a bit like one game where everyone is in the car and they are pretending to be members of a failed bank robbery and one player is shot.

Ha thank you for taking a look. That's the cover quote if ever there was one.

It's pretty fun starting from scratch with a few opening questions, like "How long has it been since all technology failed?" or "Why is it a bad idea to cross Cervantes and why did you?" and just going from there.

There isn't much to it rule wise, but I find the "sly bargain" to be a decent GM tool that I use elsewhere. It's pretty much my "let them knowingly create problems because they're greedy".

A good roleplaying story to me is like a Venture Bros episode. Total carnage they instigate and potentially survive on top of.

So, weird question regarding Rising tides: Based off of the setting and mechanics what sort of characters do you think would make good pre-gens and what sort of gear level do you think new players should have to start with?

So, i'm looking into making a worker placement game where the workers are actually different (sort of like deck building) and i am at the "play more games of this type to understand the genre a little more".

Orleans comes to mind, any other game like that were workers themselves are different?

So, i'm looking into making a worker placement game where the workers are actually different (sort of like deck building) and i am at the "play more games of this type to understand the genre a little more".

Orleans comes to mind, any other game like that were workers themselves are different?

I'd suggest Praetor, which has a clever dice-as-workers implementation where their numerical value determines how effective they are on most of the resource-producing tiles, and forces you to retire them and pay their pensions once they hit 6.

Argent: the Consortium also comes to mind, though their interaction with the spell cards in that is a significant factor in how the workers are differentiated.

Those are the two that come to mind for me, at least; someone who's deeper into worker-placement stuff may have other suggestions.

I won't bore you with my simple mechanics, but knowing it would be an easy to learn story game, does this interest anyone?

"You are an ace starfighter pilot in the war against the Maelstrom!

Our enemy has an astounding capacity to shatter our lines and learn our battle patterns, and so you have been gifted unique, modifiable personalised starfighters to disrupt the enemy's ambitions!"

Each ship houses a "pinup", an intelligent A.I navigator and advisor attuned for each pilot with quirky personalities.

Every pilot has a "flock" of drones, cheap fodder at their disposal to carry out simple tasks or take a few hits for them.

The enemy would be a completely unknown force, this Maelstrom is whatever the GM wants, but I'd personally allude to them just being another civilisation of normal humans slowly over the course of a campaign.

The game would be played in obvious phases: onboard the mothership getting ready, doing a mission, coming back for a debrief.

Lastly, every pilot is given a side goal alongside the main mission, which will earn them credit if completed, but may put them at odds with others.

Yeah, I mean basically make it BitD with some more modular playbooks and using the flock as your stress (they take hits or do actions to prevent consequences/let you push yourselves with their assistance) would work fine.

Been thinking about the West Marches style of games (obliviously) and most games struggle with some of the elements of it, such as power differences between levels, progression, none combat stuff in interesting ways (mostly because of how combat focused d20 games are) but I think if I did a Cortex/MHR based game that had Fantasy classes, you could pretty much solve most of the problems of a West March style game. Might have to look into that concept...

Doing my first game demo at a con! I hit up the guy I met at the FLGS test event and got a volunteer pass for this weekend at CoastCon in Biloxi. It's super exciting and also a bit terrifying.

I'll be bringing a friend with me, one who's been there from the beginning with this game's development and is currently the only other person to have ever run a game and created his own enemies. That'll help ease the nerves a whole lot. We'll scope out the convention this Friday, get a sense of what we're dealing with, so we can run demos the following two days.

The only convention I've ever even attended is PAX South (once), which in retrospect seems like a whole bunch of missed opportunities.

I have no idea what to expect. I'm hoping I get more people interested in trying a game than at the FLGS; day one went well, but I had trouble getting people the other days. That's not surprising; people go to the store to play other games with friends already, compete in tournaments, or buy things. I'm expecting to get a lot more interest in a convention demo room whose entire purpose is to get people to come by and play games.

I'm not entirely sure what to do if this doesn't work; I need this in order to get enough playtesters to tell whether the game's viable for publishing. Doing anything more than this would cost a lot of money, meaning I'd have to look into finding a publisher instead of planning a Kickstarter, and I don't really want to go that direction if I can avoid it. So here's hoping!

OTOH I've already learned a great deal just from the meager playtests I've been able to run so far. Feedback has helped me figure out what I need to pare down in order to sensibly sell this game (pretty much going to have to run with just 5 levels in the base game, probably including all 5 in the starter set, which means only 4 players' worth of cards, DM included), some terms to change, and where the appeal lies. My favorite bit of feedback so far was from a Magic player who said he'd tried several RPGs but just couldn't get into them; this game was the exception and was an RPG he could really play. Hooray for uniting the hobby's subcultures!

I've also had to spend a lot of time lately doing not-design, which is decidedly less fun. Getting a website back up, doing social media, making signs and "business" card handouts, that sort of thing. Another friend (the wife of the friend that's going to the con with me) is making us t-shirts with the game's logo on them, which is awesome. But really, the most enjoyable parts of this are just working on new card designs and playing the game with cool people. Hopefully I'll be doing a whole lot of the latter this weekend!

Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting

Doing my first game demo at a con! I hit up the guy I met at the FLGS test event and got a volunteer pass for this weekend at CoastCon in Biloxi. It's super exciting and also a bit terrifying.

I'll be bringing a friend with me, one who's been there from the beginning with this game's development and is currently the only other person to have ever run a game and created his own enemies. That'll help ease the nerves a whole lot. We'll scope out the convention this Friday, get a sense of what we're dealing with, so we can run demos the following two days.

The only convention I've ever even attended is PAX South (once), which in retrospect seems like a whole bunch of missed opportunities.

I have no idea what to expect. I'm hoping I get more people interested in trying a game than at the FLGS; day one went well, but I had trouble getting people the other days. That's not surprising; people go to the store to play other games with friends already, compete in tournaments, or buy things. I'm expecting to get a lot more interest in a convention demo room whose entire purpose is to get people to come by and play games.

I'm not entirely sure what to do if this doesn't work; I need this in order to get enough playtesters to tell whether the game's viable for publishing. Doing anything more than this would cost a lot of money, meaning I'd have to look into finding a publisher instead of planning a Kickstarter, and I don't really want to go that direction if I can avoid it. So here's hoping!

OTOH I've already learned a great deal just from the meager playtests I've been able to run so far. Feedback has helped me figure out what I need to pare down in order to sensibly sell this game (pretty much going to have to run with just 5 levels in the base game, probably including all 5 in the starter set, which means only 4 players' worth of cards, DM included), some terms to change, and where the appeal lies. My favorite bit of feedback so far was from a Magic player who said he'd tried several RPGs but just couldn't get into them; this game was the exception and was an RPG he could really play. Hooray for uniting the hobby's subcultures!

I've also had to spend a lot of time lately doing not-design, which is decidedly less fun. Getting a website back up, doing social media, making signs and "business" card handouts, that sort of thing. Another friend (the wife of the friend that's going to the con with me) is making us t-shirts with the game's logo on them, which is awesome. But really, the most enjoyable parts of this are just working on new card designs and playing the game with cool people. Hopefully I'll be doing a whole lot of the latter this weekend!

I'll throw what money I have to see this become a thing. I'm sure a lot of people on PA and in CF will throw what money they can at this to become a thing. You've always got our support. You might need some sort of FLGS tour, which might suck for traveling as I'm sure being a designer isn't your job, but it would get word out too. But as far as product, having enough for only 3 players and a DM seems really bad, imo. Most groups are like 4-5 players and a DM, but you will be able to sell Class Packs day one. Or maybe people will buy multiple sets of the core box. But still, tell me when and I'll throw money at it until I have all the classes, add-ons, and adventure packs!

I'll definitely have packs for individual players and more Still have plenty of time to nail down the specifics - need to contact some printers and get some details, etc. I just want to keep the starter set below a hundred bucks, preferably under 80.

Thank you for the support I'm trying to veer on the side of sharing my experiences more than anything else though, as I know it's against the rules to shill for your personal projects (and a good rule it is).

Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting

Had a really great time at CoastCon! It was only my second con, after PAX South, so my first small town kind of convention. The more laid-back atmosphere was great for getting used to running a demo table.

I met one of the guys behind Tortured Earth RPG, and he pulled me over several times for lengthy chats, totally taking me under his wing to give me tons of great knowledge and advice about indie game publishing, running vendor tables at cons, and more. Really excellent dude. Picked up a copy of his game in thanks, which he signed for me. Conventions are the best. I also was the sole attendee of a panel titled "The Art of the Game Demo," which meant it really just turned into a Q&A kind of discussion with the panelists, all of whom were demo representatives for various publishers and independent marketing firms for games. Really cool insight from that experience, too.

Looks like it'll be a little bit before our next convention. Maybe MobiCon in May. Out first big one will probably be QuestCon in October, with current attendance projections set at around 5 times the size of CoastCon. That gives us lots of time to really get our shit together.

As far as the game demos themselves? We got to run 3 demos over 2 days, which wasn't bad for an RPG at a small convention. The reception was fantastic. One guy who played yesterday (after running around in an on-point cosplay of the band Ghost on Saturday) said that it was the most fun he had at the entire convention!

At this point I need to get a few art resources on board; I've stretched the logo sketch about as far as it'll go and need something more complete. I also want to replace some of the quick-and-dirty open-license art I grabbed from using Google Image Search, especially now that we're starting to do some actual (albeit zero-cost) marketing. Apparently a couple major art museums have dumped digital versions of their entire collections online with completely open license for use, allowing for derivative works and free commercial use. That's pretty incredible and will hopefully work nicely for the next prototype revision (with some of the art potentially making it all the way to the full game, especially if that'll mean I don't have to use any repeat art like I'm currently doing in spades).

Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting

+3

Mojo_JojoA lemon squeezed in the salty fist of PoseidonRegistered Userregular

So, i'm looking into making a worker placement game where the workers are actually different (sort of like deck building) and i am at the "play more games of this type to understand the genre a little more".

Orleans comes to mind, any other game like that were workers themselves are different?

Trickerion has different worker types. The main difference is that they are variable numbers of actions so they can achieve different amounts of stuff when deployed but also you need to use your magician to trigger performances and other types grant specific bonuses if they are back stage

Hey guys, I'm working on a Frankensteined d20 system for an IRC RPG and I'm scratching my head on some of the combat mechanics. It's got firearms and swords so I've been mulling over including variable attacks per round based on weapon type. Could you recommend any systems I can reference, to see how that might be balanced out? The game is very rule-of-cool so I don't want swords to end up totally nerfed next to a gun that can attack four times in a round, but likewise it just doesn't make sense to me that a PC would be able to attack the same number of times with both.

Hey guys, I'm working on a Frankensteined d20 system for an IRC RPG and I'm scratching my head on some of the combat mechanics. It's got firearms and swords so I've been mulling over including variable attacks per round based on weapon type. Could you recommend any systems I can reference, to see how that might be balanced out? The game is very rule-of-cool so I don't want swords to end up totally nerfed next to a gun that can attack four times in a round, but likewise it just doesn't make sense to me that a PC would be able to attack the same number of times with both.

Honestly my brain went the opposite direction -- that you could swing a sword around faster than you could fire a gun due to reloading, aim, kickback, etc. But I guess it depends on the setting? Like if you're going with quality modern/future assault rifles instead of older tech?

I know that Tortured Earth uses guns, swords, and magic together in one system and one setting, so that's an option. It differentiates them more by combat options and ammo requirements than by attacks per round. Basically each weapon type comes with a number of possible attacks (plus a basic attack), so when you invest skill points into the weapon, you're actually investing into a chosen special attack (and get the basic attack by default).

If you're going totally rule of cool, then you can always just ignore the "this doesn't make sense to me" because that's literally the whole point of the rule of cool. OTOH if you want something more concrete, decide why people use swords in your world if there's awesome guns readily available. When you come up with a good reason for it, it'll probably offer reasonable options for how to balance them in the game.

The Sauce on March 17

Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting

I'm a Fan of 4th Ed D&D, you don't do extra attacks, but you simulate them with adding additional attack dice to the single attack. You just flavor the attacks in such a way to get your desired result, like "Fanning the Hammer" attack does 3 weapon dice of damage on hit, 1/2 on miss.

I also am not a fan of multiple attacks. It seriously slows combat down.

Hey guys, I'm working on a Frankensteined d20 system for an IRC RPG and I'm scratching my head on some of the combat mechanics. It's got firearms and swords so I've been mulling over including variable attacks per round based on weapon type. Could you recommend any systems I can reference, to see how that might be balanced out? The game is very rule-of-cool so I don't want swords to end up totally nerfed next to a gun that can attack four times in a round, but likewise it just doesn't make sense to me that a PC would be able to attack the same number of times with both.

Honestly my brain went the opposite direction -- that you could swing a sword around faster than you could fire a gun due to reloading, aim, kickback, etc. But I guess it depends on the setting? Like if you're going with quality modern/future assault rifles instead of older tech?

I know that Tortured Earth uses guns, swords, and magic together in one system and one setting, so that's an option. It differentiates them more by combat options and ammo requirements than by attacks per round. Basically each weapon type comes with a number of possible attacks (plus a basic attack), so when you invest skill points into the weapon, you're actually investing into a chosen special attack (and get the basic attack by default).

If you're going totally rule of cool, then you can always just ignore the "this doesn't make sense to me" because that's literally the whole point of the rule of cool. OTOH if you want something more concrete, decide why people use swords in your world if there's awesome guns readily available. When you come up with a good reason for it, it'll probably offer reasonable options for how to balance them in the game.

Yeah, it's for a Shadowrun/Final Fantasy VII/etc. type setting where you have swords and magic alongside automatics and sniper rifles and whatnot, so that's really why I started thinking "huh, mechanically an assault rifle should act differently than a magic sword". Not even really just for 'realism' per se, but it will add a bit more variety to combat and differentiate the classes a little more if the weapons act differently. Thanks for the rec on Tortured Earth, I'll take a look at it.

I'm a Fan of 4th Ed D&D, you don't do extra attacks, but you simulate them with adding additional attack dice to the single attack. You just flavor the attacks in such a way to get your desired result, like "Fanning the Hammer" attack does 3 weapon dice of damage on hit, 1/2 on miss.

I also am not a fan of multiple attacks. It seriously slows combat down.

Interesting, I hadn't considered tweaking the damage instead. I'm working off the bones of a system some friends of mine used previously where a hit was a hit no matter what, so there was no damage roll, every success did X damage based on your weapon and stats. So I think that made things a lot faster and easier in a multi-attack turn, since you just had to roll your 4d20 (or whatever) and not worry about another set of rolls after that. (Also using a dicebot is way faster than rolling handfuls of dice in person).

I played a bit of 4th Ed ages ago so I don't remember much, but I'll definitely take a look at it and see if I can incorporate anything.

The other day I pitched this random idea to a friend. It's just a fun idea, rip it up or poke holes as you see fit. It would be a game with pretty simple mechanics and might even translate better as a choose your own adventure boardgame.

"RPG Idea: It's the post-apocalypse of a future society and you're a group of robots that woke up in a dilapidated factory. Each of you has four functions. You have logic functions necessary to apply them to different situations, but you don't have AI or capacity to learn without updating your memory by scavenging. Character creation is you choosing your four functions from a list. It could be Punch, Bargain, Build, Sex or Bargain, Analyze, Sew, and Speak"

Expanding on that, it might be interesting.to start with two functions in a tutorial like level and then build from there. Like if you select Fly and Track you're basically a drone of whatever size. Each Function would have one benefit and detriment. Like Fly means you can go a lot of places others can't but settlements will see you from further away and inherently distrust you. Sex means you're good at establishing rapport but if you visit a human settlement and they find out that's a function they may seek to enslave you.

I've thought a bit about 'everyone is robot' games and one of the ideas I liked was completely divorcing the human perspective on what your character is doing and how they're doing it.

So your robot has this neat skill that fixes things up, but whenever they use it on something living (or recently living) any humans nearby freak out really bad for some reason?

So they finally work up the courage to ask an actual human what the deal with that is and the human takes a big breath and is like "Okay, so like you are a [SELF-KNOWLEDGE VIOLATION] robot with [UNKNOWN REFERENCE] and you use that to [CENSORED VERB] [WORD NOT IN DICTIONARY] and when you [UNRECOGNIZED SLANG] a person with your [BLOCKED DUE TO PARENTAL CONTROLS] that is basically super [EXPLETIVE DELETED] on all kinds of levels so for the love of god just stick to fixing mechanical things."

and the robot is like "k" and decides humans are just weird about stuff, at least the other robots appreciate being fixed!

I've thought a bit about 'everyone is robot' games and one of the ideas I liked was completely divorcing the human perspective on what your character is doing and how they're doing it.

So your robot has this neat skill that fixes things up, but whenever they use it on something living (or recently living) any humans nearby freak out really bad for some reason?

So they finally work up the courage to ask an actual human what the deal with that is and the human takes a big breath and is like "Okay, so like you are a [SELF-KNOWLEDGE VIOLATION] robot with [UNKNOWN REFERENCE] and you use that to [CENSORED VERB] [WORD NOT IN DICTIONARY] and when you [UNRECOGNIZED SLANG] a person with your [BLOCKED DUE TO PARENTAL CONTROLS] that is basically super [EXPLETIVE DELETED] on all kinds of levels so for the love of god just stick to fixing mechanical things."

and the robot is like "k" and decides humans are just weird about stuff, at least the other robots appreciate being fixed!

I really like that. I think it would be fun to play up just how different robots and humans still would be at their core. Unless you found the ultra-rare, one per game, Human Soul component that would give you a number of options but your own party might not trust you. If you added different fuel types to play up the survival/resource scarcity aspect a very efficient model would be Biomass, but then humans might think you're an evil machine out to devour them or their crops.

I'm imagining it as a different take on PBtA Move mechanics for Functions and if it were a board game 100% the Functions you choose from would be shaped like sticks of RAM and your character sheet/board would be a simplified plastic motherboard.

Okay, it's an absolute bloody mess and I still need to brew up pre-made characters and some basic NPC's but for what it's worth here's the first draft of my personal playtest rules for Fragments of Sky: That fantasy RPG thing I put the creation myth for up earlier. Gonna spoiler it because it's a real fucking wall of text and not even greatly formatted/worded.

Attributes/Skills

Brawn: Raw strength, toughness

Athletics: Catch all for physical activity, sprinting, dodging, climbing and jumping about the place comes under this. Common reactions include using it to dodge a blow, catch a friend whose falling during a climb or dash in to aid a friend whose being charged.

Brawl: Melee, whether with your fists or with a blade. Common reactions include using it to block an enemy's blow or to help your friend land a blow by occupying their target.

Leadership: Both leading allies and intimidating opponents, whether physically or mentally. Common reactions include aiding other character's social checks, ordering an NPC ally to perform a reaction on your behalf or intimidating someone to make them hesitate in their swing.

Resilience: How tough you are, added to your Vigour total, used to resist things like poison, the effects of wounds and so on. Can be used as a reaction to damage to reduce it.

Intellect: Smarts, memory and the ability to apply theoretical knowledge

Culture: Knowledge of history and myths, awareness of social standings and the politics of the Kingdoms.

Sciences: Understand mechanisms, improvise chemicals into something dangerous, in general anything a nerd character would do.
Medicine: Keep people alive, diagnose illness and know the proper ways to prevent infection while treating others.

Composure: Stay calm in the face of frightful situations, effects your Fortitude, sets the difficulty for social tests against you, basically resilience but for mental effects.

Wits: Social smarts, how quick you are mentally.

Persuade: Convince others, lie to others, in general converse to your benefit.

Observe: Perceive situations out of place, notice someone's current mood and in general see more than less capable people can.

Each player has a deck of cards consisting of 4 suits from A-7 and 2 Jokers.

Core mechanic:

Play a card from your hand then flip another off the top of your deck. Total them plus the skill you were using for your total number. For every increment of 2 above 6 you get you score a success. Tests have a minimum number of successes required based on difficulty and any left over successes are your Net Successes, which imply how well you performed and are used to decide who wins opposed tests.

Difficulty ranges from D1 (requiring an 8 or higher to succeed) all the way to D6 (requiring an 18 or higher total to succeed)

Strokes of Luck/Misfortunes: If a double comes up in your played cards then it is either a stroke of luck or a misfortune. If the colour of the suits match it's a stroke of luck. If they mismatch then it's a misfortune.

Strokes of Luck and Misfortunes are not critical hits so much as a good or bad thing happening adjacent to the result of the roll. No matter what the result of the roll should stand. That is to say that a failed roll can not be made to succeed because of a Stroke of Luck and a successful roll can not be made to fail based on a Misfortune.

However they can cause the event to unfold differently than expected. For example if a player is using a Science roll to pick the lock on the door and succeeds but with a misfortune the GM could rule that the door is opened! (The point of the roll) But from the other side by a guard walking through. In this case while a complication occurred the result still stood.

In general a Stroke of Luck should be narrated by the player who rolled it or the GM if an NPC rolled it and vice versa for Misfortunes. However in either case if the game stalls trying to think of an appropriate complication or stroke of luck to befall the character it's recommended to just give the player a point of stress back or take one away as appropriate.

Expanded Luck/Misfortune range: Several effects in the game (such as exceptionally good or poor equipment or injuries) may call for the player to make rolls with expanded Luck/Misfortune ranges. In these cases simply count all cases where cards are within 1 of eachother to be doubles. For example if someone has an expanded Misfortune range and winds up with a result of a 2 of hearts and a 3 of Spades then that would still count as a misfortune.

No matter how many effects a character is under their misfortune/luck ranges can never be expanded more than twice.

These are spent in order to flip extra cards in tests, discard extra cards for reactions and also to resist negative physical or social results such as injury or influence.

Stress is recovered between sessions, by accepting a limitation, getting a description bonus or by going with the flow.

To accept a limitation a player plays a card of value 3 or lower while explaining why they're doing so poorly with the task. For example a character may mention that, while they have an excellent Brawl skill, they have never actually used an axe in combat before. Accepting a limitation gives back 1 stress to the appropriate track if the roll still succeeds and 2 stress if the roll fails.

Going with the flow is triggered whenever half or more of the cards played during a roll are of the same suit as the attribute for the skill being used (Brawn=Hearts, Finesse=Diamonds, Intellect=Clubs and Wits=Spades). Granting back one stress immediately to the appropriate track.

Hand Management:

Players will have and curate a hand of cards as they play. Allowing them to pick and choose which cards to apply to which test. If they don't have any cards to play then they may not act.

Players start with 3 cards in hand at the start of the session and then are granted more for:

1) Seizing the initiative: Whenever a character starts on a new plan or tackles a problem from a new angle he may draw cards equal to his attribute+skill for the skill he's likely about to use.
2) Description bonuses
3) They may spend 1 stress from either pool to draw a card. There is no limit on the amount of times they may do this or when they may do it.

Pushing yourself:

In order to hit higher difficulty tests players may always push themselves. Spending stress to flip over additional cards in a test. Players must declare before a roll happens that they are pushing themselves. Declaring how much stress they're spending (at the cost of 1 stress for each card flip). Players may only flip as many extra cards as their attribute for that skill. EG even if your Brawl is 4 if your Brawn is 1 then you can only spend 1 stress for extra card flips in a sword duel.

Reactions:

Reactions are how the system handles assists, traditional reactions and teamwork tests. In order to react the player merely discards a card from their hand (the value doesn't matter) and either adds or subtracts to the result of any roll that is not their own; provided the GM deems the reaction appropriate within the fiction. A player can push themselves in reactions to discard additional cards. Paying stress for each card discarded past the first and increasing how much they influence the roll appropriately.

You can not react while taking part in an opposed roll (you're already putting your efforts into the opposed roll! The point of the system is to get players working together).

In action scenes reactions can carry your character anywhere within their current zone.

For some examples:

Ezia the duellist is standing twenty paces from a very angry man with a crossbow. She can react to his roll to hit with her athletics. Using it to dodge the arrow and reduce the result of his roll.

While the group is scaling the side of Lord Sarens fortress Emille fails her athletics check and begins to fall. Jameson can react with his own athletics to catch her (increasing her roll by his athletics skill).

Zebidiah the Wise is deep in study trying to find the solution to the group's spirit possession problem. Ezia could use her Business skill to aid him with a reaction. Justifying it as having the connections and funds to be able to source whatever books he requires.

Description bonuses: Little bonuses to give out when your players are doing good jobs bringing the fiction alive:

1) Basic descriptions that go beyond just 'I swing my sword at him' are worth one stress in reward to either track the player wants.
2) Great descriptions are worth 1 stress refund and 2 cards
3) Exceptional descriptions are worth 2 stress refunds and 3 cards.

Action Scenes:

Action scenes occur whenever it's important to know in what order multiple characters actions occur. This happens most commonly during combat but is just as valid for tense sneaking situations or heated debates. Whenever it's important to focus in on the situation and the players are at risk of harm it's probably an action scene.

During action scenes the play stops flowing narratively and instead is dictated by rounds to represent time and zones and abstract range bands for geography.

Each round a player and each acting NPC plays a card face down (NPC's merely draw off the top of the GM's deck) before being flipped simultaneously. Characters then take their turns starting from the character who played the lowest card and finishing with the character who played the highest. In the case of ties PC's always get to act first.

On their turn the character may move (explained below) and perform a single action (using the played card as the first card in the roll) in that order. A character may not act and then move.

Zones are vague spaces about 10-20m's wide that flow naturally from the environment. Within a house each room may be a zone with the corridor as it's own zone for example. On their turn characters may move anywhere within their own zone for free to grab cover or engage a nearby enemy for example. If the character moves to the next zone over they impose a +D1 penalty for their action and if they wish to move further than that they must pass a D2 Athletics check and may not take an action. If the test is failed they stop in the zone before their target zone.

Ranges are:

Engaged: within arms length of something.
Close: within the same zone as something
Medium: Target is in the next zone over
Long: Target is 2 zones away
Extreme: any distance past long. GM may choose to disallow any extreme ranged interactions based on fiction.

If a character is Engaged with an enemy they may only move away if:

1) They out number the enemy
2) They pass an opposed athletics vs the opponents Brawl. Risking counter attacks as with normal Brawl attacks.

Attacks:

Brawl attacks are always opposed by the opponents own brawl skill. Each net success increases your damage by 1. If the defender wins the Brawl test by 2 or more net successes then the attacker is hit for the defender's base weapon damage.

Ranged attacks (archery or thrown) start at D2 and then increase in difficulty by 1 for each range bracket you are outside of a weapons preferred range band. They also increase by another 1 or 2 based on targets cover. Each net success increases your damage by 1.

Resolving Damage:

Once an attack has hit compare its damage to the opponents armour:

If they are equal then flip a single card. This is the amount of damage dealt to the target's vigour.

If the damage is higher then draw additional cards equal to the difference and take the highest result as the damage dealt.

If the damage is lower then draw additional cards equal to the difference and take the lowest number as the damage dealt.

PC's may use resilience reactions to reduce damage taken.

Injuries:

Injuries occur whenever a character either takes 5 or more damage from one attack or takes damage that puts him past 0 Vigour. If both occur at once then both inflict an injury. In either case calculate the left over damage (IE, amount past 5/0) and Tick the injury box of that severity. If that box has already being ticked then tick the next highest box available. Injuries 1 through 3 inflict a difficulty penalty of that magnitude on all the character's actions (only using the highest penalty) while Injury 4 widens the character's misfortune range and injury 5 means the character is dead.

NPC's are incapacitated after taking any one injury unless otherwise noted.

Recovery:

In a session a character can seek medical aid with a medicine test equal in difficulty to the most severe injury. However this does not erase the injury box, instead merely stabilizing that injury so the character can press on without the negative side effects (exempting being dead, no one in the kingdoms is that good). If the character takes another injury then all those wounds will open up again.

Injuries can be recovered proper with resilience checks (often assisted by medicine) during downtime.

Social tests:

The default social difficulty for any given test before modifiers is equal to the targets Composure.

After a successful social test the victim may spend Fortitude equal to the net successes to resist the influence. (Note, most NPC's will not spend fortitude).

PC's and major NPC's have Belief's both major and minor. Major and minor belief's are valued at 2/1 respectively. Whenever a belief is involved in a social roll the Fortitude cost to resist it is either increased by the value of the belief or decreased depending on if the belief supports what they're being influenced to do or the influence forces the character to act against their beliefs.

Took Triptycho to MobiCon this past weekend. It was my first MobiCon, which is really weird because I've lived here all my life. It was awesome taking a game I made to a convention in my home city, I must say.

And it went really well! The convention wasn't really bigger than CoastCon, but we were busy. Friday and Saturday were pretty much non-stop games at our table, and the reception was fantastic. It was utterly exhausting -- I have no idea how teams handle the constant convention trail. Going to have to work up my stamina for it once we're at the point of trying to actually sell something.

Most of the exhaustion was mental, of course. It's all kinds of anxiety-inducing to take something I've worked on for literally years at this point and put it in front of complete strangers. My introvert ass has to put on a marketer / evangelist hat and be personable while running these games, and that takes a lot of doing. It's so incredibly rewarding, though; I don't regret a single minute of it. Watching people learn how the mechanics work, then grasp the strategies and begin making the right moves for smart plays -- I don't really have the words for that, but something is happening in those moments. Something big and important and scary and exciting.

Feedback, too, takes its toll, whether positive or negative. I'm instantly converting every comment into the "big picture" view, trying to look past the initial impressions to grasp the reasons for them. Every suggestion comes loaded with questions to answer -- why do they want this changed, what else would that break, which sort of player would be upset by changing this, and are there better ways to solve this problem? I'm going to have to acquire some discipline to simply note everything down and think about it later when I have opportunities to breathe. This part at least will ease up once we're post production, not because there'll be less of it (quite the opposite), but because it'll simply be too late to make many types of changes.

One thing that was solidified by this experience is that I need to do a major overhaul to the Exploration system. Of the three, it's the one that's the least successful, and I now have enough data to fully grasp why that is.

Previously the Exploration system worked in a very abstract manner. Players were tasked with acquiring Progress Tokens by completing Objectives that would be revealed when drawing from a deck of Trait cards, with one such card revealed per round. As the scenario continued, more and more Challenges (term meaning enemies in Exploration) would be added, making it more and more difficult.

In practice, this has several problems. First, it doesn't really tell any kind of story that's easy to follow, which is bad for an RPG system. I went too far into abstract here. Why is one player forced to play their next Action against some obstacle, like a Tight Crawlspace or Rocky Wall, while the rest of the party ignores it for a round? You can come up with explanations and interpretations, but it isn't natural.

Second, it feels like a battle of attrition more suited to survival-themed games than something appropriate for handling exploration-based challenges in an RPG. I actually like survival games and will keep this concept in my mind in case I ever work on such a system, but it's not right for Triptycho.

Third and most importantly - it lacks player agency. Players are forced to react to whatever Trait card is drawn, bending their plays often awkwardly in order to try to meet whatever requirements the Objective throws at them. While better crafting of Objectives could mitigate this somewhat, it's still bad for a game about heroes, and it makes for a less fun system to play with than the other two. And since Triptycho is probably above all else a celebration of RPG mechanics, that's absolutely unacceptable.

I'm working on a design for a new resolution system that fixes these issues. Instead of abstract Progress Tokens and Trait cards, it'll feature an actual map of connected Regions, which is rather similar to a suggestion made here on these forums awhile back by @Grunt's Ghosts during the forum playtest. The objective is simple: get from Point A to Point B without running out of Endurance Points. Obstacles will block your progress between Regions; Traps will fire at you upon entry; Environs (environmental hazards) will occupy one or more Regions and attack all PCs within their set Regions at the end of every round; and Creatures will wander about, harassing the players as they try to advance. To prevent players from falling back to a "cleared" Region and waiting until they recover all EP from playing cards (and getting all the desired cards in hand), many scenarios will feature regular spawning of new Creatures at or near the players' starting point to encourage forward progression.

This change is exciting for me because I don't actually have to change a lot. I have to make major changes to the enemy and scenario designs, but I only have to make minor adjustments to player decks. The new Searching mechanic added for the previous version fits in very naturally -- moreso in fact because with an actual map, players don't necessarily have to know ahead of time if there's anything worth finding to try to Search for. It gives me a whole new dimension to play with, one that grants more obvious and interesting player abilities. And I'm excited to play, because it'll lead to more natural automatic storytelling like we see in the Combat and Interaction systems.

Stealth became a big question mark with this more discrete realization, but my friend helped draft an excellent solution. Instead of relying solely on Endurance Points, the party as a whole will have a set of counters/points/tokens as a team. Going with the working design term of Stealth Tokens, these will come from each player's exploration role card (Craft). Each Craft grants a certain amount of tokens to the party whole, partially dependent upon terrain. For instance, the Thief may give two Stealth Tokens in all scenarios but add a third in civilization settings. The Witch would grant only one Stealth Token but add a second in wilderness settings.

Then, enemy creatures with a certain keyword/subtype (something like Stealth or Seeker) takes away party Stealth Tokens instead of dealing damage to EP. If the party runs out of tokens, the scenario ends in failure as they've been discovered; consequences of this decide what comes next.

We'll take these new ideas straight to the table at our next gaming session. I'll have to tweak some player cards and abilities on-the-fly, but I can have a full scenario or two prepared to run. I hate making a major change like this so "late," but that's the whole point of going to these conventions and getting the game to people. Best to know now rather than before I start asking people for money and prepare for a mass printing.

The Sauce on May 30

Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting

Ok, so I'm working on something, and I'm going to fish for ideas here. Basically, I'm trying to create a game of empires where espionage, secrecy, and sabotage, are big parts of it. Some of the actions such as spying and revealing information, will be public. But, I want the sabotage to be secret - such that ideally, a person will be able to activate a spy/saboteur, and perform a job of some kind at a certain location, but no one knows that THEY were behind it, at least initially. Ideally this would also leave behind some kind of token that other people could then use their spies to identify who was responsible by looking at it (or something along those lines).

I'd prefer not to have to have people close their eyes just because it would slow things down, but I'll use it if there's no better option. I've thought about using tokens in a bag, where everyone has to put something in, even if just a dummy token to show they aren't doing something, but then how to identify the location and type of action the spy is performing.

So, does anyone have any ideas? Does anyone know of any games with this kind of secrecy, not just the content of your actions, but the fact that you performed an action at all?

I've thought about using tokens in a bag, where everyone has to put something in, even if just a dummy token to show they aren't doing something, but then how to identify the location and type of action the spy is performing.

I like this idea, actually. If there's a common set of targets and actions, then everyone gets tokens for them and several dummies. If each player has an individual set of targets and actions then just make sure that the numbers are roughly equal for each player, along with several dummies.

Does anyone know of any games with this kind of secrecy, not just the content of your actions, but the fact that you performed an action at all?

Apparently the Battlestar Galatica game does this, which I haven't played. I have played, and very much enjoyed, Dark Moon, which has a similar mechanic. Also Dead of Winter. It's actually a fairly standard gimmick in the "one faction of players is secretly working against everyone else" style of game.

If you played an RPG/Board Game where players are in a party together and get their powers from three shared and shuffled decks in the middle of the table (Warrior Deck, Mage Deck, and Rogue Deck) to fill out their hand of At-Will, Encounter, and Daily abilities for the next dungeon....would that be considered a deck builder, or just a bad idea?

Stuff like having 5 At-Wills and 3 Encounters for every Daily in your personal deck, if you draw another player's card, you may give it to them but they have to trade something in return (hopefully a spare At-Will copy/something you can use in turn, but you never know), or some mechanic where Dailies are best used as part of a combo so when you draw them you may want to hang onto them until other folks in the group have also drawn theirs (unless you really need something powerful right now).

You'd have to be real precise about how you structured and balanced it, but there's neat mechanics to be explored if you go through with the concept.